This Weekend Assignment revolves around the theme of Community. What defines a community? How do they form? Why do they form? What kind of communities do animals form and how does it help them survive and flourish? These are few questions you could explore and even bring to your own communities.


But let’s first explore the previous Weekend Assignment’s theme of footnotes1.

Most notably footnotes are used in academic writing in order to make a citation or to elaborate and/or define a term.

Footnotes can be indicated numerically, but they can also be shown through symbols such as the dagger or obelus2 ( † ). In a previous #FridayFact we explained how the division symbol ( ÷ ) is also called the obelus. It was originally used by ancient Greek scholars as critical marks in manuscripts and wasn’t used as a symbol of division until 1659 by Johann Rahn3 in his algebra book Teutsche Algebra.

Footnotes have also been used as a literary device. They have been used to elaborate, to define, to break the fourth wall, and to create a separate voice from that of the main body of work.

They have also been used as a way to see what a character is thinking. This was heavily used in the book The Mezzanine4, a book we recommend to a Twitter follower. Often the bulk of a page is comprised of footnotes, creating the effect of getting lost in thought.

1https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Note_(typography)
2An Obelus is a symbol consisting of a short horizontal line with a dot above and below, and in other uses it is a symbol resembling a small dagger.
3https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Rahn
4The Mezzanine (1988) is the first novel by Nicholson Baker


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